It's just a game

Dr Gareth Schott found including elements of things that stimulate young people's interest - such as video games - into teaching can achieve a great deal. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Gareth Schott had a problem during his study into videogame violence. He wasn't much of a game player.

It's a difficulty the Waikato University researcher shares with parents. How do you talk to your kids about potentially harmful content in games when you haven't a clue how they're played?

Schott, a senior lecturer in the Department of Screen and Media Studies, is known for focusing on the positive aspects of videogaming - its "pro-social" and creative side. His project differed from most research into the topic.

Rather than look at whether exposure to games leads to increased hostility or aggression, Schott wanted to hear from the game players themselves - to try to find out just what was the appeal of "violent" games.

He already had the analytical tools - a PhD in psychology from the University of Wales, plus earlier research in the emerging field of "game studies".

What he lacked was a detailed understanding of how each game worked - the options, the tactics, the problems getting to various levels and so on.

"I don't think you can engage meaningfully in a discussion with young people about this medium if you haven't unearthed all those different aspects and experiences yourself." So Schott transformed himself into an "analyst gamer" with help from his research assistant.

"She was an excellent gamer and put me to shame. She'd save the games at different points so I could see things I would never ordinarily reach if left to my own devices."

The study, Videogame Violence: Understanding its seductions and pleasures for young people in New Zealand, involved 61 students (53 male and 8 female) in the 14-18 age group who were organised into games clubs and asked to play games that contained conflict - but not, Schott hastens to add, games that were R18 or inappropriate to their age range.

"We sat alongside young people as they played and were able to ask questions - it gave good insight to what they were doing and how they were approaching the game."

The work disrupts expectations and stereotypes. It turns out that game players are mystified by how the rest of us view them and that "violence" is often not what it seems.

While the study didn't involve any playing of R18 games (a classification that's usually because of graphic violence), the group did discuss their experiences.

"All had gone through a phase of being drawn to contentious games like Grand Theft Auto IV and had a period of engaging with those kinds of games," says Schott. "They articulated quite a bit of concern for their younger brothers or cousins because they were of the opinion that they're the ones duped into playing these contentious games."

The group felt children younger than themselves were more susceptible to the hype and all the fuss around such games, which they saw as gimmicks. "They see them as being a rip-off." Lacking in good game-play or involved narratives and not requiring strategy and thinking, the games clubs described them as a big disappointment.

There was reference also to banned games such as Manhunt and Postal, which some of the older players had seen clips of online. "They were perceived as murder simulators. They weren't embedded in a context or a narrative that players wanted to engage with."

Schott uses the term "carnivalesque death" to describe particularly gruesome deaths - highlighting the bloody, gory and grotesque - in both film and games. In films, an example would be the slow death of Boromir by successive Orc arrows in Lord of the Rings. In games, an example would be Soldier of Fortune where players are given "the power to explode, shoot off limbs, eviscerate intestines, and incite the performance of a painful death from a shot to the groin".

Schott's point is that there is violence and there is violence in games, just as in film with its sweep of genres covering everything from horror splatter to gritty war movies. But while Halo 3 and Resistance: Fall of Man, both played by the group, don't have any carnivalesque deaths and the conflict is tame by some standards, there is a lot of killing.

"If you just looked at what was happening on screen, yes, you could get very concerned very quickly about what an individual is taking in here." But delving below that, Schott found his subjects were very aware of themselves as players playing in a game.

Games aren't open-slather killfests, there are always rules the game player agrees to.

In the war genre, games favoured by many of the subjects, Schott found players approached the enemy as obstacles put in their way to hinder progress, similar to a game of chess. As one player put it: "When you're killing people in a game, you quickly start seeing them as just computer-like players."

The games are also fast-paced, so though it may look like a lot of game "existents" are being blasted out of existence, what's actually going on is survival.

"The striking thing about the games we witnessed was that players weren't doing things to others, the game was doing things to them," Schott says. Players would often avoid conflict rather than seek it out, because of "economies" such as ammunition that they had to retain. "I kinda do whatever needs to be done, not more," said one player.

Players also made distinctions between violence and cruelty, and the values represented in different types of games. "War games were presented as the most preferable and moral mode of engaging with the concept of killing and dying as opposed to games that offer contexts of inner-city gang violence or entice the player to 'become' sociopathic," wrote Schott in a paper on his research.

As one of the players explained, "there's violence and then there's cruelty, which I believe are two different things ... I try to avoid cruel games."

Another disrupting finding arose when subjects were shown examples of how their entertainment or hobby practice was represented in the media. They viewed a Fox news clip shown at the time of the Virginia Tech school shooting in 2007 which resulted in 32 deaths. It featured lawyer Jack Thompson, who had represented parents of victims of previous school shootings, arguing that violent video games were probably to blame. In fact there was no evidence of such a link or that the gunman, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, even played video games.

The surprise for Schott was that the students weren't aware of such knee-jerk causality arguments. "They had no real counter criticism to offer - they hadn't really encountered those kinds of views."

Schott had hoped to get a picture of the participants' "mediascape" - the various media they engaged with. What he found was the group didn't watch much TV or film. "That surprised me, because often video games go hand-in-hand with film - you watch the film, you play the game. But the small group we talked to were very much entrenched in the videogame culture."

Parents will be relieved to hear that was not to the exclusion of all else. "I did get stood-up quite a lot - if there was something better on offer like a football session, attendance would drop off severely. They weren't consumed by gaming and gaming only."

The group were perplexed too by the "gamer" stereotype and that people would be concerned about their practice. "They didn't feel there was such a thing as a gamer - in the same way it would be hard to characterise a television watcher. They felt they were at least engaging their brains rather than passively watching television."

Nailing down what adolescents mean had its challenges too. "They would often contradict themselves over the course of the research. It was a complex picture they were presenting partly due to their age their and their change in preferences." They also didn't like being restricted to the research study games. "We'd get a lot of requests for sports games and games of a different variety. They liked to switch between genres."

Parents, limited by their lack of game-playing ability, couldn't engage with their kids about the content, narrative or experience of game-playing. Which meant discussion tended to centre on when, and how long, they were allowed to play.

"Most would accept [they] could get immersed in a game for five hours or more if left to [their] own devices," says Schott. "So it was often perceived that constraints were were important to them."

Schott hopes his study, funded by a $140,000 Marsden Fast Start grant, will help in develop a more meaningful way to talk about games.

"We don't have much dialogue around games in our culture. That means young people sometimes do end up playing games that are inappropriate, that they shouldn't be playing, because we know no better."

He acknowledges his research's focus on the positive aspects of games means he's often seen as someone who promotes games.

As an educator he says the reasons are obvious - if you can include elements of what stimulates young people's interest into your teaching, you can achieve a great deal. Yes, it can all be educational.

Participants in the study showed a strong preference for war games - especially those attempting to represent an event or battle from a conflict that had a real basis. Schott noted that as well as engaging in the chivalrous virtues of war games - defending democracy and fighting the good fight - players would often be interested in exploring other historical accounts of those events.

Players often had vocational interests too - talking about wanting to get into the games or film industry. They can make a start at this in a third-year Screen and Media Studies paper at Waikato University making "machinima" (a conjunction of machine and cinema) films.

Students use three-dimensional graphics rendering engines from video games to generate computer animation creating their own movie plot within the games location. "It's a means of getting the students to engage with the architecture of a game - with the physics, the environments and tools of the game." One of the more creative machinima examples produced in the course has been Romeo and Juliet: an undead love story - a zombie take on Shakespeare's timeless classic.

If this all sounds too weird to comprehend, then it probably indicates a technological generation gap that can't be crossed. But for others this new sub-genre of film and alternative CGI (computer-generated imagery) is a burgeoning and serious endeavour.

Many will be preparing entries for the next machinima film festival, hoping to win a "Mackie" from the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

PARENTLINE'S CAUSE

The lobby group Parentline campaigns to restrict R18 video games from underage teenagers. Its work sprang from a project involving children aged 6 to 11 which found all had played the R18 game Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. The group has established a campaign it calls "It's illegal - R18 means R18" and which aims to protect children from playing legally restricted games on computers, PlayStations and mobile phones. Parentline says parents should watch and play what their children watch and play. It advises parents to set limits, follow ratings - under New Zealand censorship law, anyone who provides restricted games to underage teenagers can be fined up to $10,000 - and keep adult games out of the hands of children.

www.parentline.org.nz
www.censorship.govt.nz